Chapter VII: The Dispensation of the Son

Chapter VIII: The Economy of the Holy Spirit

Chapter IX: The Two Aspects of the Church

Chapter X: The Path of Connection

Chapter XI: The Divine Light

Chapter XII: Conclusion. The Feast of the Kingdom

Notes

From publishers

Before speaking about the theological works offered to the readers, we would like to mention, albeit very briefly, the main events of the life of their author.

Vladimir Nikolaevich Lossky was born on the Day of the Holy Spirit, May 25, 1903, in St. Petersburg, in the family of a famous philosopher. From his youth, his interest in the history of philosophy, patristics and the Western Middle Ages was determined. In 1920, he entered Petrograd University, but in 1922 he was forced to emigrate with his family. At first, V. Lossky lived in Prague, where he studied at the seminar of N.P. Kondakov, the famous Byzantine scholar and art historian, and then moved to Paris. For several years he studied and taught medieval history and philosophy, but by the end of the 1920s all his attention was focused on theological and ecclesiastical problems.

In 1928, he became a member of the Orthodox Brotherhood named after St. Patriarch Photius, established in Paris at the Three Hierarchs Metochion (a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church) for the establishment of Orthodoxy in France. From that time on, V. Lossky became an active defender of the canonical unity of the Russian Church; his theological works began to appear.

His brilliant talent, his excellent knowledge of the history of the Western Church and culture, his intense liturgical life, and his deep insight into the very essence of the patristic tradition allowed him to speak of Orthodoxy as the center of Truth with such force and conviction that very soon a French Orthodox community began to form in Paris.

During the Second World War, during the occupation of France by German troops, Vladimir Lossky joined the ranks of the French Resistance, but participation in the fight against fascism did not interrupt his theological studies and teaching. In December 1944, after the liberation of France, the French Orthodox Institute named after St. Dionysius was established in Paris, where Lossky taught courses in dogmatic theology and church history for several years. Since 1947, he has participated in the conferences of the Anglo-Russian Fellowship named after Saints Albania, the first martyr of England, and Sergius of Radonezh, which was created to find ways to a deep and fruitful dialogue between the Orthodox and Anglican Churches. Thanks to the work of this Fellowship, some of the works of V.N. Lossky, which will be discussed below, were translated and published in England.

In the last years of his life, Vladimir Lossky taught at the Pastoral Courses at the Western European Patriarchal Exarchate and took an active part in theological and philosophical conferences.

In 1956, V. Lossky visited Russia, the meeting with which after 34 years of separation was a great consolation for him. He died on February 7, 1958 in Paris, on the feast day of St. Gregory the Theologian.

Theology was the vocation of Vladimir Lossky. But it is not enough to have a gift, and it is not enough to be called. The gift must be revealed, and the call must be able to respond. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and everything that followed it forced many Russian people to rethink their entire existence, and life in emigration, in a foreign cultural, linguistic, everyday environment, and now a direct, face-to-face encounter with a different Christian tradition, demanded an answer to the question: what is Orthodoxy, which for many centuries was rather carelessly proclaimed the main source of Russia's political and national-cultural greatness? And did you lose the last thing in a few months of the civil war? What is Orthodoxy in the face of the Western tradition with its rather closed and self-sufficient history? Is Orthodoxy the guardian of the fullness of Divine Revelation addressed to all peoples and cultures, or is it only a form of national-ecclesiastical experience?

The work of Vladimir Lossky was a new, living and modern witness to Orthodoxy as the fullness of Truth. Brought up in the depths of Russian church life, he devoted many years of his life to a serious, close study of the Western spiritual tradition. An analysis of the causes of the church schism, which led to a divergence between East and West, required a new understanding of the patristic heritage, the experience of the holy teachers and pastors of the Church, in whose lives the Gospel was realized and whose way of life – the way of thinking and acting – the Church recognized as a model even before any division.

As early as the Second World War, Vladimir Lossky gave lectures on Orthodox mystical theology as an experimental knowledge of God. On the basis of these lectures, he wrote the book "An Essay on the Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church", which was published in French in 1944, and in 1958 appeared in English translation and for many years became for the West almost the only systematic exposition of Orthodox theology devoid of scholastic dryness. Together with L.A. Uspensky, he wrote the book "The Meaning of Icons". A course of lectures on the doctrine of the Orthodox Church became the basis of the second fundamental work of V.N. Lossky "Dogmatic Theology".